Hotlinking Protection

Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person can also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone could be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our shared plans and the only 2 things that you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just need to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature that we offer. While the typical way to do that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can execute this automatically and you will only need to select the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the required file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without issues even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You'll be able to deactivate the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.